I think SHIV must improve the DD'intelligence(NEW)

[Trout]

I'm not making predictions about Sh4, I'm simply saying that in SH3, the events that typically happen after you have made your attack do not play out with the same level of excitement or challenge as in other sub sims.

Evasion, damage control and survival should be the climax of a sub battle. In SH3 I simply dive, go to silent running, and escape. No near misses, no flickering lights, no minor damage, and certainly no being held underwater for hours at a time.

Most accounts I have read about boats being depth charged were completely unlike what I've experienced in the game. As Beery said, most sub commanders survived, (but most, I would add, could tell hair raising stories about being depth charged)

I cannot, and I've been playing a few hours a week for over a year now, on the highest difficulty level.

I submit that the damage system in SH4 could use far more attention than it got in SH3. We need many more kinds of minor damage that can create challenges for the commander, and we also need longer DC attacks.

Trout

[Trout]

"Don't expect DD AI in SHIV to ALWAYS be more aggressive or lethal than SHIII. That would not be historically accurate"

PV,

I forgot to respond to these points:

If aggressive means tenatious, then yes, it would be more historically accurate to have longer ASW battles. Accounts I've read from both theatres indicate that destroyers and other sub hunters simply don't bugger off that quickly.

As to lethality, I agree with Beery that we don't need attacks to be more lethal. I simply feel they should last longer and do more damage.

Trout

As to the amount of time destroyers spend hunting you in SHIII, part of it seems to be the routine that governs time spent away from the convoy. A lone destroyer or hunter/killer group should stay with you until they are sure you're dead or have lost contact for at least an hour. The ones tied to escort duty don't have that luxury. In real life spending too long hunting for one submarine could allow others in the area to attack too easily. The escorts have a time limit between when they lose contact with you and when they return to their escor duties. After all, keeping the enemy away from the convoy is as good as killing him, if he's too far behind to resume his attack.

One of the problems with SHI was that the destroyers could be too tenacious.

[Godalmighty83]

Originally Posted by Trout

I agree with Beery that we don't need attacks to be more lethal. I simply feel they should last longer and do more damage.

Trout

lasting longer and doing more damage isnt more lethal in you book???

SH4 does not need to be harder then SH3, but the way in which ASW takesplace should evolve a bit. make DD's a bit more conservative with depth charges (and a bit more inaccurate) but a bit more persistant and lee likely to give up.

difficulty stays the same but realism improves.

[Beery]

Originally Posted by Trout

Evasion, damage control and survival should be the climax of a sub battle. In SH3 I simply dive, go to silent running, and escape. No near misses, no flickering lights, no minor damage, and certainly no being held underwater for hours at a time.

This reflects reality. In reality U-boats most often evaded their attackers without much problem. Are you saying you NEVER get near misses? I often get them. Heck, I often get killed in the game - more often than real commanders did. That means I'm experiencing MORE depth charge attacks - or at least more deadly ones.

Most accounts I have read about boats being depth charged were completely unlike what I've experienced in the game. As Beery said, most sub commanders survived, (but most, I would add, could tell hair raising stories about being depth charged)

I cannot, and I've been playing a few hours a week for over a year now, on the highest difficulty level.

What period are you playing in? You have to realise that the game gives a very realistic simulation, and it changes as the war progresses. If you've only played in 1939-41 then your experience is true to life. Very few German U-boats were destroyed in this period. Try later in the war and you'll have more than your share of nail-biting times. One thing to note though, is that what real U-boat men found deeply frightening, you might see as no big deal. Their lives were on the line, yours isn't.

I submit that the damage system in SH4 could use far more attention than it got in SH3. We need many more kinds of minor damage that can create challenges for the commander, and we also need longer DC attacks.

It depends on what's attacking you. For hunter-killer groups I'd have to agree with you, but these groups were rarely encountered. For convoy escorts I think the game's DC attacks are long enough. The problem is, SH3 doesn't make a distinction. It goes for a generic 'one size fits all' approach. Anyway, in reality commanders had their LI attend to damage control. The commander directed the boat. I don't think that minor damage would create challenges for the commander in the way you suggest.

[Beery]

Originally Posted by Trout

Accounts I've read from both theatres indicate that destroyers and other sub hunters simply don't bugger off that quickly.

The big problem with reading anecdotal accounts is that they are part of the entertainment industry. Boring accounts simply don't get published. If you were a publisher, would you publish accounts of a 5 minute engagement where the sub easily avoided depth charges, or would you publish the ones where it was a 12 hour life and death struggle? Anecdotal evidence is often misleading. It leads people to believe that all depth charge attacks were long, drawn out, deadly duels. That simply wasn't the case.

It's the same with gun camera footage. Have you ever seen gun camera footage where a pilot put hundreds of rounds of ammo into an enemy plane to no effect? I haven't. Yet these types of things happened most of the time. But for a TV documentary they need gun camera footage where something explodes or breaks up after a few seconds. This is why air combat simulations give such a poor representation of air combat - the people making the sim assume that infotainment of the sort we get on The Military Channel represents real data and hard fact. So we get sims where air combat lasts the same amount of time as a two-second snippet of gun camera footage from an air war documentary (yes, I'm talking about IL-2), or we get sub sims where every depth charge engagement is an endurance test. This is why campaigns in most air combat and sub combat sims have been impossible to survive - in real life half of WW2 fighter pilots survived the war, and 3/4 of U-boat commanders survived the war, but in every air combat and sub sim I've ever played it's virtually impossible to survive for more than a few weeks. Modern media mislead us because they need sound and visual bytes - a couple of seconds of film that shows a gripping story, or a sentence that grossly misleads the viewer about casualty rates in WWI air combat: who hasn't heard the sentence "The life expectancy of a pilot in WW1 was two weeks"? It's completely false - the true life expectancy was between one and two years. Documentaries often use the life expectancy for untrained pilots thrown into the breech during the worst month of the war, and 'accidentally' use this statistic as if it applies to the whole conflict.

In other words, documentaries and anecdotal evidence should be taken with a pinch of salt. They're entertaining, and single experiences can even be true in themselves, but unless you have the whole context it's just not realistic to rely on anecdotal evidence when you need to find data relating to the entire experience (such as you need when building a simulation). One U-boat's exceptional experiences never equate to the entire experience of the U-boat war. Reality is a lot more mundane than anecdotes would have you believe.

[FAdmiral]

[/quote] Reality is a lot more mundane.[/quote]

And that is exactly why most of us play games
BUT we still want them to be REAL SIMULATIONS !!!


JIM

[Beery]

My point was that if someone's facing death every day, then facing it only once a week would be more mundane, but I'm sure whatever he's doing when he's facing that more mundane threat would still make a good simulation. There would be no need to make it into an arcade game to make it more exciting, as I think a realistic simulation of facing death once a week would be exciting enough.

[Torplexed]

I have to agree...drives home the old maxim that war is usually 90 percent boredom and 10 percent sheer terror.

[Safe-Keeper]

Thanks a huge deal for your reply, Beery, that was really educational .

We all know that the damage modeling is not complete enough in the game. THere are all kinds of minor damage that we simply dont take (even very minor leaks) that are survivable, but make evasion more difficult. How would you like to maintain your depth with broken gauges, bent planes, jammed valves or a sudden change in dive angle because a charge went off over you? Or how about damage that makes your boat louder? (there are many kinds!)

Exactly! Ever played TIE Fighter (or any X-Wing series game)? You take damage to engines, flight control, etc., but when you get hit, you also risk that a gauge or screen dies on you. You can really make it just fine without knowing how much energy your laser cannons have, but once your sensor screens shatter, you're blind (you can't make do with visual info only in that game).

Silent Hunter IV should be like that. They need to implement supplies (in this context spare parts), too, so that you can't just keep repairing everything without re-supplying.

[Trout]

Beery,

I've played through a number of campaigns in 1.5 years and I've lost count of how many DC attacks there have been. I've read a fair number of decent books and some "hollywood" garbage too. I have an MA in history and am probably qualified enough to know the difference most of the time.

I'll conceed that it was not a rare thing to escape an attack quickly and without damage. But attacks that did last hours and create damage were not uncommon either. In the game they hardly ever happen. It is significant that we never have to worry about battery charge or co2 and air supply.

So I've experinecd probaby hundreds of DC attacks and NEVER worried about my air supply?!

Even playing into mid-1944 this is one of the least challenging sim's I've experience. To challenge yourself you need to focus on racking up huge tonnage scores and/or taking silly risks. Somthing is not right and I'm simply suggesting that a more detailed and complex damage model would create more realistic encounters.

Trout

[DeepSix]

No offense to anybody, but IMO if SH3 - even played at just 50% reality - is "easy" for a player after late 1943, that experience is the exception rather than the rule. For me the AI destroyers are tough enough - although I would agree that there's a need for better strategic AI (just as with weather).

In fact, my problem is that with SH3 by the end of '44 or '45 I can almost count on getting killed - from my point of view the AI is actually too hard; the lethality of ASW goes up too much, while the general skill of the AI does not. Same with planes. In SH3, if you see 1 and shoot it down (late war), the AI will respond by sending 2 or 3. Shoot those down, it sends 5 or 6. The more you shoot down, the more it throws at you, until you there are too many and you have to dive. Lethal, yes. Realistic, no.

So for me the problem with SH3 is, IMO, that the ability to survive falls into a linear progression from "so easy it's ridiculous" in the early war to "virtually impossible" by the end. That's just my two cents - but I rarely play the game on 100% real so my perspective may be skewed as a result.

[Beery]

Originally Posted by Trout

...attacks that did last hours and create damage were not uncommon either.

The question is, how uncommon were they? The statistics tend to suggest that thjey were very uncommon, since even in 1944-45 the frequency of depth charge sinkings of U-boats was relatively low. If long drawn-out duels were at all common, I'd expect the rate of sinkings to be higher. If a destroyer has a U-boat targeted, it's only a matter of time until that U-boat is sunk. The number of escapes, in my opinion, is way too high for long duels to have been very common at all.

In the game they hardly ever happen. It is significant that we never have to worry about battery charge or co2 and air supply.

How often did real U-boat commanders have to worry about those things? Certainly such concerns come up frequently in movies, but we need actual statistics if we're to find the facts.

So I've experinecd probaby hundreds of DC attacks and NEVER worried about my air supply?!

All I'm suggesting is that that may not be odd. The fact that air supply CAN run out is no guarantee that it often DID run out.

Even playing into mid-1944 this is one of the least challenging sim's I've experience.

Challenge and realism are not necessarily linked. As far as I can tell, this U-boat simulation is the most realistic sub sim ever, mostly because it is LESS deadly than all the others. The others are much more challenging, much more deadly, and much LESS realistic because survival factors are poorly modelled.

To challenge yourself you need to focus on racking up huge tonnage scores and/or taking silly risks...

The challenge is in long-term survival. But again, challenge is not really the point. A challenge is what players look for in an arcade game. The point of a simulation is in getting historically accurate results. When the simulation produces careers that fall within historical limits (in terms of tonnage, overall 'feel' and survivability) the sim works, and in my view this simulation comes closer than any other. If anything, according to the statistics, it's too unforgiving.

[Beery]

Originally Posted by DeepSix

...IMO, that the ability to survive falls into a linear progression from "so easy it's ridiculous" in the early war to "virtually impossible" by the end...

For the sim to be truly realistic, the game should give players an experience from "so easy it's ridiculous" in the early war (which was absolutely realistic - there's a reason that time was called the 'happy times') to "fairly difficult" by the end of the war. Your criticisms are valid in that the late-war experience is too deadly. But in my view the problem is caused purely by AI that is too good - the late-war elite destroyer can always drop perfectly timed depth charges on your boat, and it's virtually impossible to avoid them. The statistics show that that cannot be realistic.

[DeepSix]

Originally Posted by Beery

... there's a reason that time was called the 'happy times')

Yeah, that's true; my real beef is with the late-war odds and I agree about the elite DDs at that time. Definitely agree that "fairly difficult" would be better than "certain death."